'Adoration' has good intentions

Writer-director Atom Egoyan's "Adoration" plays like a post- 9/11 talk show done as modernist cinema. All it does is relentlessly pose questions about terrorism, prejudice, family dynamics, the subjectivity of experience, the objectivity of facts, and the speed and shallowness of communication on the Internet.

The movie's fractured structure and contrived subplots obscure a potentially affecting story and do nothing to advance the debate on any of its incendiary issues.

Egoyan hooks the audience with a fiction within a fiction. Simon (Devon Bostick), a Canadian high school student, has been told by his racist grandfather, Morris (Kenneth Welsh), that his father, a Lebanese refugee named Sami (Noam Jenkins), killed his mother. (Both parents, we learn, died in a car crash; the grandfather thinks it was no accident.) The movie pivots on Simon's reactions to this declaration and to an odd assignment from his French teacher, Sabine (Arsinee Khanjian). As part of a translation and writing exercise, she reads her class an article about the Hindawi Affair, a case that became a benchmark for Israeli security. A Jordanian national living in England stuffed a bomb into his pregnant Irish fiancee's luggage and booked her on an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Inspectors searched her bag (and discovered the explosives) when she said she did not pack it herself.

Simon drafts a version of the story from the point of view of the unborn child - and says he is that child, now grown up. Behaving more like a Method actor than a French student, Simon fuses his family saga to the news story. Soon the revelation of Simon's "past" zips through the Internet and becomes a conversational flash point for classmates and adults alike.

Though young Bostick is persuasive as an unformed teenager trying on an ersatz identity for size, the movie sorely tests our willingness to suspend disbelief. In the first of too many coincidences, Sabine, like Simon's late dad, is Lebanese; she also teaches drama. When she encourages Simon to expand the monologue, she's operating as a theater coach who thinks Simon is mining "faction" for emotional truth.

In "Adoration" (how does that title fit the story?), Egoyan exploits Simon's and Sabine's overactive imaginations for superficial shocks. When Simon boards a bus with a backpack and studies snapshots of an exploded vehicle, audiences briefly wonder whether he has turned into a potential mass killer himself.

Egoyan's melodrama is crude, and his good intentions stick out all over the place. He wants viewers to recognize the tortured humanity within horrifying acts. That's one reason the movie won the "ecumenical prize" at Cannes (for "films that have a spiritual dimension and plumb the depths of the human condition"). Egoyan uses audiovisual chat rooms to air the range of responses to Middle Eastern terrorism and get split-screen effects on the cheap. He also explores the fear of the unknown that can escalate "civilized" people's anger at contemporary barbarism.

But the movie's increasingly clunky intertwining of Simon and Sabine sabotages its potential for personal and political tragedy.

The one character who sticks with you is Simon's Uncle Tom, a tow-truck operator who regularly extorts money from drivers whose cars have been tagged. Scott Speedman plays Tom with a simmering rage that goes beyond his hatred of his father, his confusion over the death of his sister and brother-in-law, and the demands placed on him by his nephew.

The glint in his eyes seems to tell anyone who condescends to him (including the director), "You can't make small of me!" Speedman's performance deserves unqualified praise - if not adoration.

MPAA rating: R (for language)

Running time: 1:40

Starring Scott Speedman (Tom), Rachel Blanchard (Rachel) and Kenneth Welsh (Morris). A Sony Pictures Classics release. Directed by Atom Egoyan.